2004-10-24 23:16

by Vasil Kolev

It’s over.

In the morning I got up easier than yesterday, noticed Yovko and Mishinev before they called me (they asked me if I had an IDS that tracks who passes in front of the building), we went to pick up Rosi, and then we went to IEC. There for a record time we unpacked and prepared the equipment, then we started to swear at Rumen, who was drinking until 4 with some people, and was late – and we were using his laptop to do the live feed.

He came almost on time, and we were able to start with a 2-3 minutes delay, by the standard program (I again won’t go into details on the lectures, I wasn’t listening enough). In the beginning the inet connection was OK, but then started to fail, and at some moment it wasn’t able to push more than half a mbps traffic, so there wasn’t any way to to make the transmission. In the end I made dvgrab’s buffer to be able to hold up to ~62 seconds, and talked to the local people, who spoke with 0rbitel. Next year we definitely have to fix the bandwidth problem.

At least the archive was working good, and today weren’t any serious screw-ups, except that there might be some missing parts from Nedyalkov’s lecture (which is too bad, the lecture was great). The raw archive can be found at vasil.ludost.net/raw/, but I have to warn you – it’s really raw, can be watched with mplayer -forceidx (or if you fix it with something similar), there are a lot of interruptions, in short – it’s no good :) At the same url there’s a raw archive of the presentations, but you’d better get them from http://openfest.org/presentations/2004/ (and still there are a few missing).

There were enough screw-ups at the fest… Bogomil Shopov had made his presentation with windows, and in some stupid flash format, the resulting file was a .exe (if it was something normal, I would’ve transferred it to my laptop). I think that some people could’ve decided to lynch him, if they’ve seen what was he using (and probably I would’ve helped them :) ). Another really funny moment was when Sceant (or however it’s spelled) connected their laptop to the projector, to show the winner, pressed the key to display it, and then their video output died, leading to a clear blue screen on the projector. There was a silence of about half second, followed by thundering laughter…

Another screw-up was the whole BSD conference, we should’ve attached some nazi to them, to push and pull them together, to get organized, they were able do well only two lectures – the one for the translation of the BSD documentation by Dimiter Vasilev, and the one by Peter Pentchev about the ports collection. If tomorrow we’re combining again, we’ll apply a lot of control over them… At least Pentchev saved them, by making a 1h20min lecture, and by filling his hall :)
(and I think that Zhoro will speak a lot worse about them than me)

The lecture about Biona by Kolyo Kolev should be noted – their stuff will greatly help the transition of the accountants’ machines from some good-for-nothing OSes.

I have to note the appearance of 4 people from Sloboden Softver – Macedonia (or were they more?), who did a short presentation of the events that are happening there, and it was interesting, with , with a lot of photos :) They’re thinking about a similar event there around December, so maybe we’ll be able to go there to talk, to do some exchange, so to say :)

And a special thanks to the saviors of the day – SSH and the X protocol :) First on the laptop that was used for the first presentation at the BSDCon there wasn’t openoffice, so I made them an account on mine, and let them run it from there. After that the Macedonians wanted to do some changes to their presentation, and the only free machine was the one that we used to send the video feed, which was overloaded, so I again connected to woland, and ran ooimpress from there. And the third one was again with openoffice, Nedyalkov didn’t have the necessary fonts on his linux installation on his laptop, so we again used my openoffice. It it wasn’t for this technology, we would’ve had some great problems.

So we finished with the lecture about linux-bg (there I got convinced that the people see marla as the bulgarian sourceforge, and there are things that I haven’t had the slightest idea (the CVS repository of the bulgarian KDE translation?). I was really surprised) and we closed with a few words from Yovko, and the ill-fated Sceant stuff (which was able to show some winners :) ). Then we gathered the equipment, and did an autopsy of the fest for 30-40 minutes, to see what could’ve been better. Then we transported the equipment where necessary, and had some dinner at “Krivoto”, where we talked a bit. I stayed until 20:00, and then I went home, punched the boxing bag for a while, and then I uploaded the presentations from my laptop, and did some more useful stuff.

Now I’ll be going to sleep, and tomorrow I’m not going to get up before 12. If the builders at the other side of the street wake me up, I’ll dress up in some OpenFest t-shirt, and will go there to tell them that I’m from the open eye religious cult, and will call down curses on them.

One Response to “2004-10-24 23:16”

  1. debt consolidation Says:

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